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May 10, 2020

More about RSS for Blogger Comments and Labels

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In this post, I want to quickly explain about how to find and use RSS feeds for blog comments and also feeds for specific posts by label from a blog.

Blogger Comments

In the post about subscribing to feeds with Inoreader, I mentioned that Inoreader will automatically detect the blog comments feed for WordPress blogs. Now that you've had a chance to subscribe to some feeds and explore the reading experience with Inoreader, I wanted to circle back around to this question of subscribing to blog comments. That may or may not be important for your personal blog reading, but it is definitely important for student blog networks.

So, there are indeed comment feeds for Blogger blogs, and here is how to find the address you need:

First, start with your blog address. For example, this is my class blog that I use when I'm a student in the Myth-Folklore and Indian Epics classes (I participate as a student in addition to teaching the classes):

https://religiousreading.blogspot.com/

To get the comments feed, I just add feeds/comments/default to that address:

https://religiousreading.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default

That's the address I can copy-and-paste into Inoreader in order to subscribe to the comments on that blog:


Yes, it's a bit tedious not being able to have Inoreader automatically detect the Blogger comments feeds, but I use a hack to help me with that. As students give me their blog addresses, I put that address into a spreadsheet (which is helpful all semester long), and in that spreadsheet I have a column that automatically adds "feeds/comments/default" to that address. It's a concatenate formula:


Which gives me the comments feed URL I need to paste into Inoreader:


I'll say more about the logistics of student blog addresses and building the network in a future post.


Blogger Labels

Inoreader does not do any autodetection for blog feeds that are based on labels, so if you want to subscribe to just a specific label at a blog, you need to know how to create the URL address on your own. You can use these models to generate the address you need. And be warned: these URLs are case sensitive, so make sure you get the correct capitalization of the label.

https://___.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/___

For example, here are the Summer2020 posts at this blog.
https://oudigitools.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/Summer2020

Being able to subscribe to specific labels can be really useful when you have a blog that you use for multiple purposes.


A word about WordPress Feeds

There is a huge array of RSS feeds available for WordPress blogs; see the WordPress Support site for all the details: WordPress Feeds.


So, now you know even more about how feeds work, and next up is more information about putting feeds in Inoreader Folders.
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